the image is on the film the moment the shutter closes. no one can see it until someone develops it.
vivian maier carried a rolleiflex for forty years and worked as a nanny the whole time. about a hundred thousand negatives. she printed three thousand of them. two thousand rolls came back from the lab and were never developed at all.
in 2007 she fell behind on a storage unit and the contents went to auction in chicago. john maloof paid three hundred and eighty dollars for one box, wanting old street pictures for a local history. there was nothing in it he could use. two years later he found her name pencilled on a lab envelope and searched it. one result came back, a tribune notice from a few days earlier.
a missed payment. an auction. a stranger with the wrong project. a search engine. take away any one of them and the boxes go to a landfill. the pictures were already made. they were only unreachable.